The Author

Anne-Marie Marra is a Seattle native, having grown up in the area before heading down to Southern California for college. Even then, her interest in gaming and trademark law were easily apparent, as her undergraduate thesis was a look at the iconography of Sherlock Holmes, and how the “trademark” aspects of the great detective were not based on the original Conan Doyle source material.

Graduating into a small recession (and the Dot-Com Bust), she joined the Peace Corps, teaching English as a foreign language at a public school in a small town in Kazakhstan for a little over two years. Her smattering of Russian and ability to take long walks in the snow date from that time.

After working in Human Resources as a file clerk and assistant, Anne-Marie attended law school at Seattle University, graduating cum laude in 2009 with an Intellectual Property Focus Area. She was active in the SBA, and helped found the SU chapter of Students for Free Culture, having been inspired by Lawrence Lessig’s scholarship on the matter.

Anne-Marie took (and passed) the Washington State Bar in July 2009, and celebrated by immediately going back to school. She obtained an LL.M. in Intellectual Property Law and Policy from the University of Washington in June 2010, and is currently revising her thesis for potential publication.

She has some reservations about posting actual pictures of herself online because of past difficulties, and is content to let the image of Aeris from the webcomic VGCats stand in for her for the moment. Anne-Marie likes purple, and the thought of an anthropomorphic cat arguing whether Katamari Damacy could be used as evidence of narcotic use by the creators is highly amusing to her.